Covered bond market participants should stick to revised guidelines and reduce the number of publicity events to ensure the sectorâs greater efficiency and unification, says a European bond industry trade body.

The Euro Debt Market Association, a French trade group set up by banks in 2002 which opened to issuers and investors last year, published its final report last week after a 12-month investigation into the €1.6 trillion ($1.9 trillion) market.

The investigation was handled by a 30-strong working party set up by the association and Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. It included Ted Packmohr, an analyst at the German bank; Ted Lord, head of covered bonds at Barclays Capital; Juan Pablo Soriano, a credit analyst at Moody’s Investors Service; and representatives from the World Bank, electronic bond exchange EuroMTS and French covered bond issuer Crédit Foncier de France.

The growth of the sector, which has expanded from its German roots to the rest of the world in the past few years, has created problems including weaker credit ratings and a confusing range of structures and regulatory frameworks, according to the association’s findings.

The report comes after covered bond bankers and issuers warned at a Financial News forum last month that it would be some time before the market was regarded as global, despite the surge in interest among investors.

The association said the large number of events each year publicising the market created problems because investors were not sufficiently well represented, while many events failed to achieve critical mass and were uncoordinated. It recommended supporting one flagship covered bond event, to be determined by an investor survey.

The trade body also urged investment banks to encourage covered bond issuers to ensure that their deals complied with its rules for primary market deals, while banks should follow new rules in the secondary markets.

These rules include informing the market of the minimum and maximum size of a bond during pre-marketing, and having at least three banks as marketmakers for a deal. The rules will apply to deals worth at least €750m.

It said: “We suggest strengthening the co-operation among individual market participants, especially by supporting a specialist organisation. We suggest supporting this organisation in bundling promotion power, providing market participants with one ‘to-go-to’ source of information, and recommending events to members.”